No, the Limebird site hasn’t moved into real estate; today I am going to be talking about that venerable article the ’fix-up’ novel. The subject came up on Neeks’ recent post ‘Short Story Writing‘ in relation to “The Martian Chronicles” and I wanted to expand upon it here.

A fix-up novel is one where a series of short stories are linked together by some device – that could be a framing story, or sections of narration between the main stories. The term itself was first coined by A. E. van Vogt; in 1980 van Vogt was interviewed by Robert Weinberg and was asked about the series of events that led to his putting together a fix-up novel; to which van Vogt responded, “Let’s put it very simply: a novel would sell whereas the individual stories seldom did. Hence, the great thought came; and the fix-up novels began. It…